A year ago, I thought we would be celebrating an exciting first year and planning more growth and expansion. My point here is not to dwell on the past. Instead, I will quietly lift a glass to my TBD colleagues and share some lessons for other digital pioneers (and for my Journal Register Co. colleagues) from our TBD experience.

Digital products need digital sales teams. I won’t elaborate on why and how Allbritton messed up in digital sales (or anything else). I want to state everything as a lesson. The TBD experience proved what I already knew: A digital operation needs a sales manager and sales staff focused on the success of the digital project.

Start small or be patient. Clayton Christensen, the leading authority on disruptive innovation, advises starting small. In my job interview before joining TBD, I asked Allbritton how long we had to make money, because we were going to be starting big and that costs a lot of money before you get up to full steam. He noted that Politico made money in its third year and said he was ready to give it five years. He said TBD would have a similar runway. He’s entitled to change his mind and he did, abandoning our approach after six months. But he went about this wrong. If you’re going to start as big as TBD did, you need a few years to become profitable. If you don’t have the patience for the long haul, you’d better start small.

Pursue multiple revenue streams. You need to pursue non-advertising revenue streams and non-traditional ad approaches. I have blogged about this topic before and won’t repeat those points here. Brady was more interested in pursuing multiple revenue streams than his Allbritton bosses. If we had been allowed to get up to full speed and had pursued more revenue streams with a digital sales staff, we would have celebrated profitability in three to five years, I am sure.

Pursue mobile opportunities aggressively. We developed a couple cool apps and engaged nicely with the mobile community using social media, but Jim and I could not get approval to hire the top-flight mobile leader we wanted, and the ownership did not embrace mobile as aggressively and imaginatively as we should have.

Excel in breaking news. Make this a top priority in local coverage. Become the place where people turn for breaking news (and keep coming back for updates), and you will establish your brand quickly. Print-based news organizations think they cover breaking news well, but most don’t and that’s a tremendous disruptive opportunity.

Excel in social media. It’s not just that Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, Foursquare and YouTube are excellent sharing platforms whose use is growing dramatically. These are essential journalistic tools and you need to use them aggressively and smartly to rule in breaking news. They also are great conversational tools for building relationships with your audience. You don’t want to just build an audience, you want relationships and social media are where people are building relationships today. Mandy Jenkins, our social media producer, led a great staff effort in this area. If breaking news wasn’t TBD’s greatest strength, social media was (and social media helped us excel in breaking news, so they worked well together).

Hire talented people. I never worked with a more amazing team of creative, talented people than I did at TBD. The quick splash we made in the Washington market was a result of the outstanding hires made by Brady, Editor Erik Wemple, TV vice president Steve Chaggaris, Senior Product Manager Bageshri Ghate and me.

Develop a strong local blogger network. TBD’s blog network was an outstanding asset. We had more than 200 blogs pointing to our site and eager to work with us. Their links gave us outstanding contact. I think with a better sales effort, we would have developed a strong advertising relationship, too. Our community hosts, Jeff Sonderman, Lisa Rowan, Daniel Victor and Nathasha Lim did an amazing job.

Master SEO and analytics.Mitch Schuler’s expertise in these areas helped significantly with TBD’s traffic. You need to know what you’re doing well (and what you’re not), and you need to know how to help people find your content. Mitch helped TBD staffers excel at SEO.

Don’t rely on “Field of Dreams” marketing. They don’t come just because you build it. They come if you market effectively. We built audience effectively with social media, SEO, our blog network and promotional messages on our own TV stations. We would have been able to build a notably larger audience if we had spent some money to market. Unless you’re starting small, some local marketing money needs to be part of a startup budget.

Don’t waste time on bitterness. I could go on a whole rant about the bad decisions Allbritton made relating to TBD. But it wouldn’t get me anywhere and I’d still have to move on. Bosses are going to make bad decisions. But don’t let them turn you bitter; bitterness hurts you more than it hurts them. Learn your lessons and move on.

No, Rick. I made pretty good money and moved on to a job where I make more. It was a great experience, a “test and adjust” for my career, and I am glad I did it (and hope I would have had the courage to do it, even if I knew the outcome in advance).

To be clear, though, the Allbritton moves in January did not fit the Christensen “test and adjust” model. Slashing and moving back to an old model is not an innovative adjustment. And TBD didn’t even really get tested. We were still developing some important next steps at the time the company pulled back.

> To be clear, though, the Allbritton moves in January did not fit
> the Christensen “test and adjust” model.

Fully understood and agreed.

I was indeed thinking in terms of “test and adjust” for your career (as you surmised) and for the overall concept, which could serve as a jump start for the next potential entrant on it’s trip up the S-curve – particuarly in that you’ve been so kind as to publish a nice set of lessons learned from the experience.

Nobody knows what works or doesn’t; that is the sad thing about pioneering spirit…I’m lucky to have a night job in a copper and brass mill, I am building character; Chapter 58, with a lot of folks who look to me for clues…It’s eery, yet somewhat comforting…When those doors shut, it’ll be just another case of idled capacity..And they will all remember what the “good boss” told them about the future…Every industry needs a check with the imbalanced…..The greedy bastards that run ’em don’t need to understand, they have (or at lead have had) the money, ego and day in the sun.

[…] to his TBD colleagues and shares some lessons for other digital pioneers from his TBD experience. (SteveButtry.com)Groupon has filed an amended S1 filingwith the SEC this morning. New information about underwriters […]

Nice review – as local blogger/media/marketing people, it’s been interesting to watch the rise and fall (or irrelevance) of the hypersoloco attempts around DC (LoudounExtra, TBD, Patch)….TBD was especially promising. But we’re still here, doing what we’ve always done, and look forward to the next group of forward-thinking investors to harness the power of community-based content curation…

[…] funny what bubbles up at the same time in the industry. On Tuesday, Steve Buttry posted what he thinks the lessons are from the launch and failure of TBD.com, which a year ago many of us thought/hoped was a future model for the news business. Maybe it was, […]

I completely agree with your comment on bitterness. These transitions can be difficult. One of the smartest moves I’ve made in my career is taking a couple of months off after a buy-out. I now refer to it as my detox period. It allowed me to put the move in perspective and strongly move into the next phase of my career. Looking forward to catching up soon.

Totally agree with starting small (preferably) or giving it a longer ramp time to profitability. I had a similar experience in 2008 with new strategic local digital pure-play efforts. The “L” in P&L was too heavy, the “P” expectations were too strong and short term, there lacked a digital sales team (though we did try to be innovative). In the end, the efforts folded, but not without learning and some success that could have been built upon. I chalked it up to culture, and moved on to pursue innovation vs hunkering down. Of course, it was 2009 and the world was severely shaken.

Traditional media culture has inhibited the move into digital for years. Will it ever evolve enough? Maybe, but it is hard not to see Clayton Christensen’s Innovators Dilemma logic in that the newer once-small business overtakes the new, growing and future larger opportunity. At the intersection, the incumbent either buys the new business with its weakening pile of cash, or slides into the past.

As a larger scale example, News Corp buys a trendy once-powerhouse MySpace, quickly signs a mega revenue deal with Google (ROI – check), culture sets in, innovation reverses, and later sells it for 1/10th what it paid. Facebook maintained its startup culture and innovative drive, adapted, captured market share, and a lot of people later get rich while the company impacts hundreds of millions. MySpace could have been music/entertainment 2.0 (not Apple, not Pandora, not Netflix, not YouTube). It had the brand. It had the audience. It had ties to licensing. But, it lacked culture in an emerging world where culture is king.

Failures must be expected and will happen on the way to success. What is important is to have a culture of innovation, a culture that can adapt, and the drive to see it through even if it means changing up so many pieces the final success looks different from the original vision. If traditional players are to capture emerging opportunities, they must let themselves think like startups. Somehow Apple has defied gravity by becoming the world’s largest startup. Google changed up its top executive to support the startup affect. These companies, along with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pandora are emerging as the new incumbents. Other new entrants will follow. Zynga? And while there is still cash flowing in, traditional media has an opportunity to extend into this new digital era. Otherwise, the traditional culture will hold on to the traditional opportunity. That won’t go away, entirely. But it sure is smaller than what could be.

If there is such a thing as an answer, I think it has to do with innovative culture, taking small risks that teach you something and allow you to refine and move forward, re-framing success and failure, and being in touch with your customer (and rethinking who your customer and competition is).

[…] I have provided it at no charge. But I regard my blog as a huge financial success. My jobs with TBD and Journal Register Co. came at least in part because of the international reputation I developed, […]

[…] Kort and Erik Wemple as they left for other pursuits. After I left TBD in May, I blogged about lessons from the TBD experience in August, a year after we launched. A few weeks later, prompted by a discussion on Twitter, I […]

[…] When it launched, I was focused intensely on the launch of another much-hyped local news product, TBD. When a member of our TBD Community Network expressed concern about competition from Patch, I […]

[…] to woo me in early 2011. They, like much of the news business, had watched the rise and fall of TBD, and they thought my community engagement approach fit their digital-first strategy for Postmedia […]